That sounds great, but an entry level wireless microphone system can cost as much as your camera did. You also have to order them online and wait to test them once they arrive.

I decided to see if it was possible to create a battery powered (i.e. portable) wireless microphone system from components that are available locally and for about $60. I also recorded myself while I did it. The result is this three part series where I literally show you every detail.

It turned out to be quite easy to find components and add battery power to them. The down side is that the sound quality isn’t very good and, without some sort of mixer, the audio comes in on only one channel. Aside from that, this is an easy, fast and inexpensive way to build a portable wireless microphone system for your Kodak Zi8.

Remember to leave me a comment telling me what you think and if you used my suggestion.

Part 1, Components and Assembly

Part 2, Testing and Permanent Assembly (AA Batteries)

Part 3, Build 9V Battery Assembly

Happy Recording!

I recently developed a tool to increase the optin rate on my websites (and for my clients). During development I got to work with nearly all of the major email service providers. While many of them are very strong and offer some clever tools to make marketers more successful, iContact stood out with a special 2-for-1 offering of a combined email and survey service. Let me explain why this is such a powerful combination and then I’ll show you a tool that can make it even better.

Utility

Email services are what I like to call a utility service for marketers. It’s like gas and electricity for a home. You can’t go without them and really have a decent quality of life, and when they flake out, the pain is felt almost immediately. The good news is that nearly all the email services have a rock solid platform that’s fast and reliable.

As I integrated each of these services, there were some features that started to jump out to me as being extremely useful. One of the services that I think did the best job with this was iContact, and to understand why I say that, it’s important to review the advice I got as a beginner to email marketing.

I heard from Jeff Walker, Ed Dale, John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan and just about everyone else that you have to do these two things with your list:

• Ask them what they want
• Build a relationship

That’s why most of these marketers use surveys in various ways to accomplish both of these tasks. But they use a combination of two separate services to get it done. That means their email list and communication are in a database independent from survey results and respondents. As it turns out, that can present a big challenge when processing survey results and conducting follow up.

2-for-1 email and surveys

The first thing I noticed about iContact is that they put those two services in one integrated package. I can only imagine how much easier it becomes for new marketers to survey and interact with their lists, not to mention the efficiency gains that more experienced marketers get. I should know since I’ve spent time working through the details of not having an integrated email and survey service.

The integration is great and opens many possibilities, however it’s also important to know that each service can be used independently. That means you can publish a survey and link to it from your website without an email, or include it in an email broadcast or an autoresponder sequence. It’s very flexible.

Leverage the combination

Since this was the only truly integrated provider I found (some parent companies offer both as separate labels so they can charge more, but they don’t integrate like iContact) I decided to publish a customized version of the optincrusher software. I called it ioptinboost.

The reason I decided to create a separate piece of software is that I could integrate the survey function in directly. So with ioptinboost you can run a survey on your site, the same way you would an optin form. It will get your visitors attention and tell you loads about the traffic you’re getting to your site.

If you structure your survey correctly, you can even provide an incentive and get them onto an autoresponder. If you’ve followed Eben Pagan for a while, that’s very similar to what he did with the Psychic Sales Letter. There’s some very powerful psychology at play here, and as a smart marketer, you can leverage it like never before.

Free Softare

Just like the optincrusher, I’m releasing ioptinboost for free (as of right now anyway). That won’t last forever, but today you can download it here:

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If this article has piqued your interest, you can try the icontact service for free. They have great live support, so it’s very easy to get your first survey or campaign up and running quick. Of course I created HD videos showing you how to do everything you need to do on http://ioptinboost.com/

Leave a comment about your experience with iContact and how you use their service to improve your marketing.

The reason I wanted to post it here is that it turned out to be a good tutorial about using a fantastic free tool (Inkscape) to create graphics for your website. I actually show you how to use Photoshop too.

You can download the HD version below the video. If you watch it on the page, click the full screen button so that you get all the details.

Download in HD

What is the point?

The people that are looking for a tutorial about FTP often don’t know the ‘basics’. When you tell them to type the ‘host’ in here, and ‘navigate’ to this folder, and ‘set permissions’ there… Well, it just doesn’t mean anything. The first video that I watched used at least a half a dozen words in the first 30 seconds that most regular users just don’t get.

So I decided to change my approach. Rather than teach you about FTP, I’d rather tell you why you shouldn’t ever use FTP again.  Huh?

Let’s start out with a simple question. At the moment you decided to learn how to FTP something up to your server, what were you trying to accomplish? I think it’s very unlikely that you were sitting down to figure out how FTP works and how to use it to get stuff up to your website.

Instead, I bet you were trying to communicate with your audience/clients/visitors. That’s a really important distinction. You don’t want to know how to FTP. You want to communicate with people. So how can you ditch the FTP and start communicating with your clients?

Use a blog

The absolute best way I can think of is to use a blog.  With most modern hosting accounts you can install a blog without FTP, without database setup and without needing to use any tool other than your web browser (I recommend Google Chrome, by the way). You literally just click a few buttons and you’re done!  Once it’s done then you use a web browser, from anywhere in the world, to communicate with people.

If you’re thinking that a blog would be great except that you still need to upload pictures and videos and so you can’t get around FTP, then you’re wrong. WordPress has little “easy buttons” that let you find the file on your computer and it puts it right in where it belongs. As far as video, you can now just paste a link to a youtube video and WordPress will take care of the rest.

Special cases

There are special cases when you need to FTP something up to your server, but those are more rare. When that moment comes along, do yourself a favor and hire your kids to figure it out for you. If you don’t have kids at home, find a neighbor that’s in high school and have them give you a hand. The $10 you pay them will be a huge prize and you can keep your hands clean of all the dirty work.

Keep your eye on the real prize

Don’t forget the real purpose of your website is to communicate with your target audience. Do yourself (and your site visitors) a favor.  Stop trying to figure out how to FTP stuff up to your server and instead figure out how to use WordPress.  Then go on to provide the content that they want. That’s the real gem!

(photo by Gabriella Fabbri)

One thing you’ll notice is that I don’t spend a lot of time talking about the actual coding, because there isn’t really very much at all.  Using my approach (I show you in the video) nearly all the heavy lifting can be done using the “easy buttons” that are available with most modern hosting companies.

Here’s what I cover in this video:

• What alternatives there are to WordPress and why I still use WordPress
• Why Google loves WordPress blogs
• Email list segmentation and membership websites
• A little trick that will save you money finding premium solutions online (that’s all I can say in this teaser, but you’ll thank me once you see it)
• Prevent spam on your blog
• Protect your digital content
• When and how to upgrade your site (this is so easy it hurts)
• Best places to host your membership web site
• The top reasons to buy premium themes for WordPress

This is the full 1:15 video.  After you press play you might have to wait a minute for it to start loading (be patient).

One reason this is so cool is that I was able to use a few hundred dollars worth of technology and perform a live broadcast for all my website members members and have a high quality finished product for members to download.

Example clips

I think it goes without saying that this wasn’t a Late Show quality set with three studio quality camera setup, but it didn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars either. First off, let me give you a little clip from the interview. The first clip shows you the quality that was broadcast (cropped down to what I call internet HD 640×360). The second clip shows you the quality of the HD recording I provided for download.

Now for the HD recording

The interview was conducted in the evening and so there was no natural sunlight to filter in. Some minor color correction was performed on the original HD footage before rendering.

Equipment

The single biggest problem I’ve had while recording videos and broadcasting has been lighting.  There are a few ways to overcome lighting problems, but none of them have been easy.  More expensive cameras provide better low light performance.  Expensive lighting can compensate for lower end cameras.  Lucky for you, the inexpensive technology and a trick I’ll show you here, can give you really stunning results on a tight budget.

Here’s a picture of what my front room looked like for my latest internet broadcast.

Here’s the list of equipment that I used to do my broadcast.

• Dell PC (about $500)
• 1.2M DSL connection from Qwest (that’s the standard speed) ($32 per month)
• Logitech® Webcam C500 ($50)
• Kodak Zi8 HD camera ($180)
• Lights on a 2×4 ($20)
• Adobe Flash Media Encoder Live 3 (Free)
• Ustream.tv account (Free)

Lighting

The lighting that I used for this broadcast workout out really well.  I started with a basic bathroom light fixture from Lowe’s (like this one http://bit.ly/doKn9U).  I bought several feet of electrical cord and a plug end.  I then purchased a 2×4 for $1.34.  I also purchased four 100 watt equivalent florescent white bulbs (not soft white since that gives a yellow cast).  After putting it all together I used some saw horses from my garage to make it stand up.

I should say that I’m an electrical engineer and I’m reckless.  Putting something like this together can be dangerous and may represent a fire hazard.  If you’re not comfortable with this then don’t do it.

Since the four bulbs are separated be a fixed distance from each other, you want to keep them far enough away from the subject that they shadows can blur together.  You also want to use a light that can illuminate the background somewhat.  These two techniques will prevent a hard cast shadow from distracting viewers.  In some cases you can also use Styrofoam or some type of translucent cloth to diffuse the light and soften it (not in color, but in terms of shadows).

Since neither of my camera’s supported manual white balance, I’m stuck adjusting the color in software after the fact.  If it’s important to you to have a properly white balanced image for broadcast then you’ll need to spend more on your cameras, although what Logitech calls Right Light technology does a pretty good job of compensating for low light and white balancing correctly.

Setup

The setup is a lot easier than it might seem.  I purchased the webcam and installed it with the standard software that came in the box.  I followed some instructions on ustream’s website and downloaded and installed Adobe’s Flash Media Live Encoder (let’s just call that FMLE), which enables me to make several tweaks that are very useful.

For example, FMLE allows me to do two things that really improve the quality of the broadcast and provide me with a backup video in case my higher quality camera chokes.  First is that I can send the video into it from my webcam at the optimal image quality for my webcam.  In my case it was the native 1.3 mega pixel frame size of 1024×768.  Doing this reduces image quality loss and reduces the amount of work my computer has to do for the camera.  I can further crop, position and define the adjustments I want to make to prepare the output image for ustream.  In my case I wanted to broadcast at 640×480.  Along with these settings I have the freedom to define my bit rate for both audio and video so that I can be sure my internet connection will accommodate it.

Aside from the video quality settings above, FMLE allows me to record the stream locally, before it goes up to the server.  The file is save in flv format (ready to play on the internet) and doesn’t suffer from any loss due to network speed issues.  In other words, the recording is much higher quality than if I used ustreams record feature.  For some people the quality of this video will be all you need to post to your membership website.  If you are also recording with a higher quality camera, this is a good backup.  The very second you finish your broadcast you also have a finished video ready to view.  You don’t have to convert, render or do any other processing.  Just double click and watch.

As with all of these details, I recommend you play around with FMLE as much as possible beforehand so that you don’t miss something during the broadcast.  Things that you might mess up include not triggering the recording before starting the video stream and choosing a bit rate that broadcasts choppy over your internet connection.  Don’t forget to adjust your power saving and screen saver settings before you start broadcasting.

Broadcast vs. Download

I usually like to do some editing after a broadcast before I make the video available for download.  Sometimes I’m editing the content to get just the right segments and other times I may just be color correcting and adding a watermark.  Even if I don’t plan to do any editing, I make sure that I’m recording with more than one device, because I’m paranoid.  You should be paranoid too!

In my case, my Logitech C500 produced a great quality video and there were no glitches.  However, my Kodak Zi8 produced an even higher quality HD recording that enabled me to provide both enhanced sound and image quality.  I used Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum to apply basic color correction and to do an overlay that identifies the source of the video.

Starting with a higher quality original also gives me more options when it comes to converting the video for use elsewhere.  For example, the footage from my Zi8 allows me to easily put the interview on a DVD, broadcast it over the internet, upload full HD to youtube and render my self termed “internet half HD” format to my own website.  That’s a lot of flexibility, and the flash video file alone wouldn’t provide me with that.  But if you’re on a real budget then the $50 webcam with FMLE is too good to pass up and give’s very decent quality.

Improvements

As I watch the recording I can see a few things that I would like to improve (aside from my interview style).  The first is the seating and scenery.  Even a fake tree in the corner would have added a lot to the recording.  Nicer chairs or a cool couch and a band to provide a musical sound track would have given this broadcast a considerable bump!  Maybe a new shirt too.

Overall, i put this broadcast together in under an hour (technologically) with only a few hundred dollars of equipment and both me and my members are happy with the result.  As soon as I have some construction and furniture budget I can work on the improvements I mentioned.

As always, please comment below.

I searched for “wordpress 2.9 video tutorials” and to my great surprise I couldn’t find a good video tutorial. I found videos talking about new features in WordPress 2.9, and I found some that talked about plugins for WordPress 2.9, but none that just showed someone how to post to their blog.

SEO can be a funny thing, because I highly doubt that there aren’t any good video tutorials out there. For whatever reason I just couldn’t find them. So I went ahead and made a short video showing the basics of posting to a WordPress 2.9 blog. Since I love MemberWing I went to the trouble of showing how to include paid vs. premium content in a blog post.  Have a look below (it’s HD, so you can make it full screen and easily see all the details).

By the way, in WordPress 2.9, all I had to do to embed that video was paste the YouTube link (that’s amazing). In all my years developing software I haven’t many tools that meet the need like WordPress does. Hopefully this short tutorial video will get you on your way.

If you know of other tutorials or have questions, post them as comments below. I read read every comment.

Interest-based stalking (oops, I mean advertising)

A little background: On March 12, 2009 I received an email from Google about my Adsense account (since I’m a publisher). The subject was “Introducing interest-based advertising – action required for your AdSense account“. They sum it up best in the body of the email, which I’ll just quote here:

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser web site and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

When I read that I had a mixed reaction. Of course I want to monetize my web sites, but like Paul Meyers mentions about sidewiki and the overall Google infrastructure, they have access to a lot of information. In some ways, Google knows more about what I’m thinking than my wife does. For example, I use www.google.com search, GMail, picasa, Google Apps for my domain, google docs, Adsense, Adwords, youtube, and probably a few other Google services that I can’t remember right now. They record what I search for, they store my emails, etc. They have a lot of information about me, and their license agreement (you know that thing you never read because you don’t have a law degree or an extra hour in your day) spells out how they can use all that information. Turns out some of it might surprise you.

So what does this have to do with Google stalking me? Yesterday I was visiting a few sites of interest to me and quickly noticed that they were all showing banner ads for the same company (see screenshots below). I might not have taken notice, except that the company they were advertising had ZERO logical relation to the site I was visiting. There was no context and no relevance.

I did a little more digging and found that the banners were all showing inside Google Adsense blocks. I decided to run a little experiment to see if Google really was stalking me. I started from the site where I first noticed the irrelevant ad and went on to visit sites that I know/own, and that have Adsense. I then started trying to find sites that have the least amount to do with the ad I was being shown to see if the ad followed me.

PRWeb and riding lawn mowers

The ad was for PRWeb, and I’m not sure how the Google Adsense network could know about my interest in PRWeb just from my surfing habits or how many other bits of my information they infiltrated to make that connection. It’s also surprising that they would be so blatant in their display of those ads when they’re not contextually relevant to the sites that I visited. Finally, I wonder if PRWeb knows that Google is showing their ad on riding lawn mower review web sites to someone (me) that just published an article bringing into question the value of the PRWeb service.

So, here’s the list of sites that I visited. In case you’re interested I’ve included the search term I used to find the site (in Google) for those sites that I searched by topic. My aim was to visit sites that were as different as possible from each other to see how far Google would go in showing contextually irrelevant ads to me based on what it assumes my interests are.

• http://www.slavetosave.blogspot.com/
• http://www.runningshoesexpert.com/
• http://www.maintainfit.com/
• swimming pool blog: http://www.pool-help.com/
• online dating blog: http://www.onlinedatingnewsblog.com/
• guinea pigs blog: http://www.furrypal.blogspot.com/
• gardening blog: http://www.gardeningblog.net/
• calendar templates: http://www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-calendar-template.html

I took screen shots along the way so you could see how awkward their placement can be. Sometimes the text ads might go unnoticed, but the bright red and gray banners really stand out on a pink mommy’s coupon site.

Even after I got this collection of screen grabs I visited a few more sites and saw the PRWeb text ads and banners on every single site. It was really quite creepy!

Primary suspect: Google Chrome

At first I didn’t know exactly what Google was using to identify me or where they were pulling the information that suggests I would be an appropriate target for PRWeb ads so I did a few experiments.   All of the screen shots above were taken (and ads seen) while using Google Chrome.  In Firefox I saw only contextually relevant ads.  What does Chrome know that Firefox doesn’t?

To test this I opened a new incognito window in Chrome and visited the same sites. This time I saw only relevant ads and nothing about PRWeb. So it appeared that the Google was getting it’s tip from Chrome, but it turned out the same thing could have happened in any browser.

Cookies and the SQLite database

Just for kicks I went to another computer and used chrome to open up the sites and verify that I saw only contextually relevant ads, regardless of where I was logged in (e.g. Gmail in another tab).   The reason that I suspected this might work was because the incognito session prevented the stalking ads from being shown.   In order to understand this you need to understand a two things about how browsers manage information.

The first are cookies. These are small bits of text information stored on your computer. They can store information about your passwords, preferences, session IDs, etc. These values are intended to be domain specific.  That means your browser should only send information about specificdomain.com to the server when you are requesting information from specificdomain.com.  It should never send the specificdomain.com cookies to anotherdomain.com.

Next is that each browser has a database that holds information about what you’ve typed into forms, stored passwords, browsing history, etc. In Chrome and Firefox the underlying database is the fast, efficient SQLite engine. You can use an SQLite client and view and tweak these files by hand if you like. It might surprise you to see the amount of information your browser stores about you browsing habits.

So, when you run incognito (or private) in a browser you essentially bypass these two elements. Cookies are isolated to that session and destroyed when it exits. SQLite values are not recorded, such as browsing history and search terms. If I’m not mistaken, a private/incognito session also isolates you to some degree from other information already stored from non-incognito sessions.

Safe browsing

Since Google Chrome and Firefox both use the same basic stack which includes cookies and an SQLite database, I’m not sure that Google stalking me had as much to do with Chrome as it did with the fact that I had been using Chrome as my primary browser for a few months. So as a final experiment I went back to Chrome on my original PC and cleared all the cookies and all of the ads went back to being relevant and contextual.

To shed a little more light on this, Google has explained what cookies it uses and how the cookie value might have been set, although I somehow doubt that PRWeb had this in mind. Google sets cookies from any site that displays Adsense and uses those cookies to track an individual’s interests. Here’s what they say:

When users visit a partner’s web site and either view or click on an ad, a cookie may be dropped on that end user’s browser. The data gathered from these cookies will be used to help better serve and manage ads on the publisher’s site(s) and across the web.

Implications for Adwords Advertisers

So, if I clicked on a prweb ad on Google’s search page and that set a cookie showing that I was interested in Press Release submission services, now Google is going to show me ads about PRWeb on every site I ever visit. That could be both good and bad for an advertiser. In the case of PRWeb I had already purchased (and they already paid for my click). Google, however, doesn’t know or care whether you’ve already purchased a service, but they do know that you clicked on a certain ad and if you clicked it once, you’ll probably click it again.

Advertisers might end up spending a lot more on clicks, but they also might get “pre-qualified” traffic from the content network. This could make testing the content network a little trickier, since the content network has always been a bit of a crapshoot. Now if you start to target a site because you’re getting clicks there, it might not be due to any contextual relevance. Instead they might just have the cookie set and Google shows them what it thinks they’ll click. On the other hand, like Perry Marshall explains about right angle connections, you might just find an angle or some new keywords based on the sites where people go after (maybe a long time after) they first show interest in you by clicking one of your other ads.

Either way, this adds a lot of complexity and new variables into both the safe browsing discussion and the Google services for Adsense publishers and Adwords advertisers.

My conclusion from all of this is that I need to be more aware of how regular and useful information, like cookies, is used and have a plan to do some of my own cleanup along the way. I also question whether or not I have too many of my eggs in the Google basket.   Since I’m tied into so many of their services, it becomes more and more difficult to know when they might have crossed the line and compromised my privacy (which doesn’t have as much to do with their policy as my threshold for their tactics and approach).

Additional resources and links

In 134 comments on Google’s blog about the interest based advertising there is clear concern about this type of personalization. Some even go so far as to call it spyware.

Interest based advertising help center

And, to be perfectly up front, I don’t pretend to know anything about public relations. I’ve read a book and scoured the web, including some resources from PRWeb itself. I’m still exploring what will be effective, as you can tell by reading my recent discussion about the state of the newspaper industry.

The right timing

First I should mention timing. I think mine was off a little bit. The book I read about submitting press releases suggested that holidays, and especially the week between Christmas and New Year’s day, can be the best time to get press. The author of the book worked in television and from his book it seems the majority of the features he did were the same day. He did his research very early and went out to get the latest news as it happened (or as close to the time it happened as possible).

News may work differently from one medium to another, and it may even be very different from city to city. My experience with the Idaho Statesman (Boise/Idaho newspaper) has been that they plan much further ahead than same day for tomorrow’s article. From discussions with howdoesshe.com it would seem the local TV station (at least channel 6) plans ahead too. They may even keep a type of backup archive of stories to use when they don’t have enough “real news” to fill the time.

As a result of my reading, I planned to put out a number of press releases during the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Another thing the book mentioned was that press releases get weeded out really quickly. News agencies and television stations have so many releases coming in every day that they only have a few seconds to decide whether or not to pass it on to a reporter. To account for this I also planned to send a series of press releases, each highlighting a different part of the program I was trying to publicize.

After some discussion with a very nice person at the newspaper, I now understand a few things that I think are really worth mentioning. First is that for the type of story I had and the type of article (write up) I got in the newspaper, more lead time would have been beneficial (more on this below about PRWeb). As it turns out, the paper had to work pretty hard to get me in when it did. The time from first press release to being in the paper was about seven days. I’m not sure if that is average lead time, but that’s about right for the two times I was in the paper. If I had given them an extra week of lead time, I might have gotten a better feature or had a chance to talk to a reporter and have an individual article. It’s no guarantee, but more time might have increased the chances.

Another bit of useful feedback I got was that from the multiple press releases I sent in, they had a hard time knowing exactly what to feature. So instead of trashing all but the most interesting, all of my press releases made it to the same person that would have to write about the program creating a 7-11 candy bar problem. Don’t you remember being seven years old with two warm quarters clenched in your little clammy palm staring at the seemingly endless choices of candybars at 7-11? I think there may have been times that I deliberated for an hour about the best purchase to make… I’m not sure if this strategy would have worked better in a different situation, city or medium, but in this case it probably wasn’t necessary.

Newspaper vs. television

Another interesting point is that while I have been successful at getting the attention of the local newspaper, I haven’t gotten any response from the TV stations. I actually expected this based on the book I read. The author, Jeff Crilley explains that a TV station wants something that is visually appealing and lends itself to video. They don’t want a talking head or a screenshot. That also explains why channel 6 picked up the howdoesshe.com group. They have put a lot of effort into both making cute stuff and taking good pictures of it.

One thing I’ll never know is whether or not my press releases made it into the hands of a reporter that never did anything with them or whether they got weeded out before the reporter. That would be a very important metric, if only there was a way to get it.

At this point one thing that I can say is the better you know your local news sources and what they like, the easier it will be to get press, if press is what you want.

News worthiness

So what qualifies as news? That might be like answering a three year old’s questions about Santa Clause. Whatever you tell him, he’s going to compare it to what he’s heard from other kids, adults and advertisers. No matter what you say, it’s going to be wrong in some cases and different in others. So why am I even considering this as I’m talking about PRWeb?

The news worthiness of whatever you want the press to cover plays a big part in whether or not anyone will want to publish it. Keep in mind that it’s news worthiness from the perspective of the journalist that might cover it. That might not line up with your view of what’s news worthy. So all of my considerations about newspapers, TV and PRWeb might not accurately represent average results if I didn’t really have a news worthy story. I obviously thought that I had a news worthy story with my Fitness Jumpstart program (on Maintain Fit).

SEO gains, PR losses

My timing blunder with PRWeb seems the most likely culprit for it’s failure. Here’s what happened. I had been looking at doing some press, but wasn’t sure about whether or not I should spend the $80 to $360 for PRWeb to publish it. What I did instead was publish a few of my releases using two mechanisms. First was www.prlog.com and the other was to use scribd and embed them on my exercise log blog.

The results from my approach were effective from an SEO perspective. With the three press releases that I put out this way I garnered some good search engine placement for terms related to my program. I also sent these press releases (as I already mentioned) to local newspapers and television stations. What I didn’t do was pay PRWeb to handle my press release during that crucial week between Christmas and New Year’s. Being the cheapskate that I am I chose the approach I mentioned above.

As soon as the first article was published and didn’t produce any perceivable traffic (remember that bit about newspapers being dead?), I started to think about other ways to get traffic for the program. That’s when I went back to PRWeb. I searched the internet and found many people speak highly of PRWeb and read about the mountains of traffic they got. While I knew that most journalists had already written their New Year’s resolution articles, I thought maybe there was a place for a late comer (aren’t there folks that procrastinate their New Year’s resolutions?). And leaning on the good things I had heard about PRWeb I decided to pay $80 and see what happened.

PRWeb results

At that price point they didn’t post my press release until two days had passed, which was on January 8th. I think you can guess what happened. Not much. True to their word, PRWeb got some attention, including a search for “mr usa” included some news results for the day of the release. Yahoo! News republished the story here. I can’t really tell how much SEO effect it might have had and I know it might have been more if I paid another $120 for the SEO package.

Google Analytics PRWeb

Woopra Analytics PRWeb

What were the actual traffic numbers? Google Analytics says that I got 12 visits from PRWeb and Woopra shows almost double that at 23 visits. That’s in contrast to the stats PRWeb shows with 65631 impressions, 708 reads and over 200 interactions. I’m not sure what interactions are, but those numbers seem to suggest that I had a 1% readthrough rate (did you like that word?) for the release on their site, and out of 200 interactions I got between 12 and 23 people to my site (with an 83.33% bounce rate). Even taking the higher number from Woopra, this would compare to a 0.035% clickthrough rate and an average cost per click of $3.48.

PRWeb analytics

Whoa! Did I just say that I paid $3.48 per visitor to my website? That can make Google adwords look REALLY CHEAP in comparison, but that may not be the full story. For example, if my story sucked, or my release was poorly timed (I do think the timing was bad), that might have something to do with it. Another thing that’s hard/impossible to gauge is the amount of SEO benefit (if any) that I might have gotten from the link on prweb.com. I did format my URL so that it would have the keywords I thought were a best fit, but they don’t turn out to be very high traffic keywords.

Press best practices for online marketers

Yahoo! News republication of PRWeb press release

So the elements that I’ve discussed in this post include timing, content (or story) and some of the particulars of direct traffic vs. SEO benefit from press release submissions. I’ve also mentioned some of the differences between what newspapers and television stations are looking for. Depending on the news source, you might benefit from a little more lead time. You’ll also want to think about whether or not what you have makes a good visual or a better written article.

As a direct traffic source, PRWeb doesn’t seem to live up to it’s cost of $80. However, with the right, well timed story, it might produce traffic through other means (e.g. someone publishes and article or feature on it). And for the record, the Yahoo! News republish of the press release brought ZERO visitors. I’m not sure how their news service works, but getting published in Yahoo! News didn’t produce any direct traffic results. It may turn out that it does have some SEO benefit, but I have yet to prove that since they use a redirect mechanism rather than just linking to my site.

If you have experience with press releases, take a minute and post your comments below.

• Aweber
• InfusionSoft

In fact, Jeff Walker (the fame of http://www.productlaunchformula.com and http://www.sixinseven.com), went to the trouble to have aweber clone their service under the domain name http://www.profollow.com.  I’m not sure when he did this, but he made a big deal about it when he originally launched Product Launch Formula 2.0 in April of 2008.

He actually promised a bonus for anyone that signed up with profollow.com which would be a collection of videos showing how he used the aweber service and how to do e-mail marketing the “right way”.  Since everyone agreed that Aweber was all the rage, I was deciding whether I should use Jeff Walker’s private label version or the regular deal.

So I finally signed up with profollow.com so that I could get the videos.  As it turns out, the bonus never materialized.  On July 16th, 2009, Jeff’s assistant Betty sent me this:

“Yes, it will be about 3 weeks before Jeff will have time to look into
this… you haven’t missed anything and it is on his list of things.
He hasn’t forgotten about it.”

So I waited, but it never came.  Oh well, so what.  It was unexpected since Jeff claims to be so big on over delivering and even providing additional unannounced bonuses.  I suppose it might be that he just didn’t get enough people signed up to justify the time to make the videos based on the money he makes reselling Aweber.  After all, he’s done a few more launches of PLF and related coaching, seminars, etc. since then.  Can’t fault a guy for chasing the money.

It probably would have slipped from my mind (like it probably did from the minds of the others that use profollow), except that I’ve been having trouble with Aweber (profollow) today and I’m wondering if it’s time to move on.  Usually they’re pretty sharp, but they don’t seem to give much credence to what I say or ask.  They just make the changes they like and seem to say “live with it”.

For example, in the last few weeks they rolled out a new webform module that embeds a whole bunch of junk CSS and other stuff to format it.  I suspect that a lot of their users don’t even know why this wouldn’t be a good thing, but I have a few gripes about it (including page bloat, SEO and getting it to fit with an existing style on my site).  When I asked if there was some way to go back to the old way they simply say “No”.  That’s it.

So what’s so bad about it?   I’ll just list out the things bother me about aweber (that I can remember right now):

• Their JavaScript web form generator is blocked by ad blocking plugins and software, which means that anyone using the JavaScript to embed an Aweber opt in form may be missing a percentage of web surfers.  Fortunately for them, most web users aren’t savvy enough to use ad blocking software (I would guess 20% or less of the web surfing population).
• Their new webforms embed a bunch of CSS (9KB worth of stuff), which may or may not play well with wordpress and/or custom pages on my site.  I would rather just have the html form details and let my site CSS trickle down to format that form too, so it fits in.  If it’s going to be on every page I also don’t want the bloat there to meddle with my SEO efforts.
• They provide very little control over when to send e-mail.  I can’t send two separate e-mails immediately.  I can’t decide what time of day to send an e-mail or what day of the week.  This may have changed recently as a paid upgrade, but the last time I asked support it wasn’t possible.  Even this open source autoresponder allows you to choose down to the exact minute that a message should go out after some threshold time has been met…
• I can’t delay the welcome message to accomplish a committed list type of function.  This is where I want someone to sign up on a list that is only a stepping stone list.  They should only receive e-mail on that list if they don’t progress on to the next list.  Why can’t I delay the welcome message or just skip it?
• Aweber doesn’t provide secure forms, so that if I want to embed a form into a secure page on my site, or post from a secure page, site visitors will get the impression that I’m submitting their information insecurely to a third party.  This seems crazy since a secure certificate is as little as $30/year.  Why wouldn’t they allow for secure opt in?
• Another secure/non-secure issue is that if I do have a secure site and someone opts in to my list, even when I have confirmed opt in turned off, aweber will send a confirmation message.  This is a bit of a limitation of SSL, since they can’t get all the information they need from the page (or so they say), but it’s a bother still the same.
• Their HTML editor for e-mail messages makes including personalized details in URLs impossible.  For example, let’s say I wanted to produce a URL that would customize the content on a page on my site, so I would include their name or e-mail address.  Well, their HTML editor messes up the URL so that it doesn’t work. (post a comment if you want further explanation).

I can’t remember other issues right now (just as well I suppose).  So what about InfusionSoft?  Well, I suppose if I had a bundle of money I could go with them.  They add a ton of value, but they charge for it too.  I do think I’ll end up there someday, but while I’m on the unlimited plan with aweber, I just can’t beat the price for the features with another paid plan right now.  I’m also not interested in maintaining the software on my own servers, though I have done this, I do believe that the performance and deliverability would degrade as my lists sizes increase.

On the whole, I am satisfied with Aweber, even though sometimes it seems that they are missing some pretty standard features and control (or that their support doesn’t care what I think).  For the price I’m paying and the deliverability I get, I don’t think I can beat them right now.

If you know of another e-mail host that has “fixed” the issues I mention above with Aweber, leave a comment and a link.  If I just missed the Jeff Walker videos that he promised as a profollow bonus, then let me know.  I would love to hear what he has to say about e-mail marketing, especially if he’s going to give tips about how to build the story and build relationships.  Those are two things I think he’s good at, if he would just make those videos.